Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

suzy otm

on basically everything wrt this article

i don't think i even mind the tone so much

When the women did appear on the thread (someone alerted us and I had to drop my Knitting A Uterus class to intervene) Marcello happened to side with our comments. Also the next man who invokes 'save-a-ho' ought to be set upon by Erinyes who'll ensure he's wearing his nuts for earrings.

Marcello calling people "Taliban" for disagreeing with him is not very helpful IMHO.

And that's regardless of the merits or otherwise of any poster's arguments.

The latest piece is much less inflammatory than the first one, but stuff like this: the dramatic arc of all TV dramas, of all rom-coms, is dependent on someone becoming pregnant and finding true happiness as a consequence is patently pish.

clearly lots of ilxors would be happy if the guardian had no women writers so the taliban comparison is justified.

clearly lots of ilxors would be happy if they were guardian writers but after years of sniping at mostly female guardian writers instead of, um, getting off their arses and doing something about writing for the guardian (or anywhere else for that matter), this is unlikely to happen.

qed.

I'm going to pitch them a column - as Will Thisdo - lambasting, like, everyone for the prevailing definition of "interesting, cool guy" as a guy who is either single or divorced.

Dude, they've already got Tim Dowling. He's even American.

i have never seen such dreadful mis-use of the term 'clearly' than on this thread

xpost to Marcello: Dude, I had my chance to work at The Guardian a long time ago and decided against it: I wanted to stay in Scotland. You having fun there building your little collection of straw men today?

As for "no women writers": no rubbish writers of either sex would be nice, but that ain't gonna happen on any paper ever. The Guardian, mercifully, has enough good ones to make it worth reading.

xp and QED as well!

(Also: I can't speak for my subconscious processes, but the writer's gender is one of the last things I consciously consider when I'm reading a piece/ranting about how shit it is on ILX. Maybe that's because I'm a lazy patriarch who doesn't worry enough about gender politics, but hey. Like I say, I try to be an equal-opportunities arsehole.)

Of course, it's okay for Dingbod to go on about how rubbish he thinks Alexis Petridis is more or less every week cos he's a bloke!

B-but he's got a girl's name?!?

What are you, a member of the Taliban or something?

Suggest Taliban.

http://www.virginmedia.com/images/lulu-bondtheme-gal-431.jpg

Boom Tal-i-bang

Hahaha - I read the end of the thread and assumed it was about this instead

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/18/iran-elections-us-foreign-policy

FUCK YOU SEAMUS MILNE

fuck you with an ice-pick. he's always an immense twat, but this – comparing ahmadinejad with attlee -- is just...

In fact, the unexpected defeat of Hezbollah's opposition coalition (which nevertheless won the largest number of votes) seems to have had more to do with local Lebanese sectarian issues and large-scale vote buying than the Obama effect.

dry yer eyes mate

If Ahmadinejad was in fact the winner, then there is an attempted coup going on in Tehran right now, and it is being led by Mousavi and his western-backed supporters.

yeah a coup led by vicious unarmed thugs against defenceless snipers on roofs. still, classic tactics to accuse your opponents of your own crimes. this guy is the worst thing in the guardian, and that includes tanya gold.

I'm as cynical and jaded as the next guy, sorry, I'm more cynical and jaded than the next guy, but even I'm surprised and dismayed by a lot of the "Ahmedinejad won fair and square" coverage and comment

meanwhile on the news pages, turnouts of more than 100 per cent?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/jun/17/iran-election-rigging

Tehran's gilded youth

The bastards

it's tough being the winchester-and-oxford-educated son of the director general of the bbc.

it's hard to believe that rigging alone could account for the 11 million-vote gap between the main contenders

But does he offer any easier explanation to believe, or indeed any explanation at all? Does he fuck. Childish, egotistical bastard, this guy.

Gilded bastard

it's hard to believe that rigging alone could account for the 11 million-vote gap between the main contenders

Er, see, that's the thing. No it isn't. In fact, it's really fucking easy.

help review mps expense claims forms! only 26287 pages to go!
http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/

^^^ clever idea that. the taxpayers' alliance is doing something similar only with an email list.

had a look through a couple yesterday. frank dobson, my mp, doesn't charge for much, but did bill us for the cost of getting accountants to help him with his expenses. bit cheeky considering he's been all over the local papers boasting about how he's got nothing to hide.

george galloway for some reason has a sheet of headed paper with the "back boris!" logo on it, inserted into his 2007-8 claims. puzzling.

The age of the newspaper is dead.
― mark s, Tuesday, 3 July 2001

Something has clearly gone wrong with G2: the other week they ran a page-long feature on the phenomenon of "Jumping the shark" (referring to that moment when a long-running tv fave finally loses the plot completely, apparently derived from a late episode of Happy Days where Fonzie, yes, jumped a shark). This was all well and good (except it was inane and ripped off from a website [this is a whole other can of worms]), but they ran an almost IDENTICAL story in the Guide not two weeks previously. Do they not read their own paper, or did they simply think the readers wouldn't notice?

What the paper still has going for it: George Monbiot's column, the Diary, Steve Bell, giving review space to Ians Sansom and Penman, and the tv columns of Nancy Banks-Smith. (When N B-S finally pops her clogs I will have to think very hard about buying the paper.)

What is leading the paper ever closer to the abyss: consistently terrible pop coverage (honorable exceptions: Maddy Costa, Betty Clarke); the fatuous new Saturday mag (Zoe Ball on dressing? match the celebrity with the pet? that awful woman talking about words that should be banned??); Charlotte bloody Raven.

― stevie t, Tuesday, 3 July 2001

such different times.

True that, no-one's bigged up Monbiot on here for some time

charlotte raven is like dorothy parker's more talented sister compared with the current shower imho.

The TV section really died a death didn't it? Nancy Banks Smith and that other dude whose name escapes me were always thoughtful and interesting, now it's the insufferably dull drudgery of Sam "I'm a bloke me" Wollaston.

reporters behind exposing mandelson's home loans, neil hamilton's brown envelopes and jonathan aitken's rusty sword of truth are taking redundancy, so i think in answer to the thread's question we can say, yes, objectively worse.

Fuck, what? First I've heard of this ... can you tell us more? Link?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/19/duncan-campell-david-hencke-guardian

Well, shit. Wonder what their plans are? A couple of the names on that list will be old enough to treat VR as early retirement, but ... sad times, really.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/21/kevin-mckenna-michael-martin-comment

not sure if this is a joke...

Hahaha. KMcK is an old and dear friend and former boss of mine. Without having read the piece, I'm going to say "yes, he'll be taking the piss" ...

... hmm. Having read it, I think that whatever he's doing there hasn't really worked, has it? There's some lovely writing in there but it's wasted because, er, the whole premise of the piece is fucked.

One of the papers I work for went and did extensive vox-pops in Springburn a few weeks ago, just as the shit was hitting the fan, and not one of Martin's constituents had a good word to say about him as a politician. (A surprising number of fellow MPs -- even the ones putting the boot in -- said they thought he was a lovely bloke, just a shit Speaker.)

Was there an element of snobbery in the treatment of Martin by some hacks and some fellow MPs? Undoubtedly. Did this cross over into crass Scottish stereotyping? At times, yes. Is this something to get upset by? Not unless you're fantastically thin-skinned and have nothing better to do with your time (neither of which is true of Kevin McKenna). Sure, there's always a place in a Sunday paper for an amusing devil's-advocate comment-piece ... but this doesn't work at all, basically because Martin is fundamentally indefensible.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/video/2009/jun/23/bartons-britain-liverpool-tanning

i am enjoying my 16 page pro-biotic pullout today. but then i'm a big fan of bifudus actiregularis...

"Jamie T is a storyteller, a raconteur, the heir apparent to Billy Bragg, blessed with a talent for making the mundane extraordinary. His songs carry all the clutter and dust, the rattle and roll and restlessness of real life; they arrive with a twinkle in their eye, news to tell and dirt beneath their fingernails."

Dear God, Laura has outdone herself today.

You could at least stick up for your brother.

i never understood the joke where you guys call it the Grauniad. Can you explain for a yankee/dumbass